Steven Hylands

Lowdown - Auto-generate newsletters from Slack community content

Lowdown unleashes the valuable content locked within Slack and delivers it to your members inboxes as a weekly email newsletter, guiding them back to engage.

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Chris Armstrong
This could be very useful, I’m starting to drown in Slack communities
Steven Hylands
@armstrong IKR? Welcome to my world. Would you want control over which channels you receive updates from or are you happy to go with what the community surfaces?
Chris Armstrong
@shylands I think I'd be happy with a general summary of what's going on in the Slack workspaces I’m a part of. May want more fine-grained control down the line, but not at first
Steven Hylands
@armstrong Cool, we really need a way for community members like yourself to recommend Lowdown to the Slack's they are in!
Steven Hylands
👋 Hi Product Hunt! Last year I started a Slack community which grew to over 800 members, but I noticed that many of the people who joined didn’t engage and eventually disappeared. I desperately wanted a way to re-engage with these members so I could remind them of the valuable content my community offered. If I could do that they’d know what they missed and could return to get involved. That’s when we had the idea to highlight the post's members engaged with the most in a weekly newsletter — and Lowdown was born! Here’s how it works: - Lowdown watches the Slack channels of your choice and automatically highlights the posts with the most replies and emoji reactions. You can also and post to your newsletter directly from Slack in two clicks. - Easily get subscribers by either auto-subscribing your entire membership or asking for permission via a message sent to any channel/DM by our Slackbot. - That’s it, your newsletter will send every week with absolutely no need for manual input. We’re also sharing transparent bi-weekly progress updates in our quest to achieve $10K MRR by July 2020. https://getlowdown.com/blog/ and developing a version of Lowdown specifically for tech teams using Slack. Register your interest here https://getlowdown.com/teams We’d love to hear any feedback or ideas on how we can improve Lowdown, so please tell us what you think. Cheers! 💬📰🖖
Steven Hylands
@brandonuttley Cheers Brandon that's really appreciated 🙌
David Shawe
200% value added to any slack community. 💯💯
Phil McClure
👋 I’m Phil, Co-founder and CTO at Lowdown. If you have any questions about Lowdown, I’d be glad to help.
Budibase
This looks great. We hope to build a community (we're open source) and I see how this could be super helpful. I'll check it out. Great work.
Steven Hylands
@budibase Thanks Joe. I'd highly recommend building a community especially as an open-source project. We recently launched a guide on how to setup a Slack community and landing page in one hour. Might be helpful :) https://getlowdown.com/how-to-cr...
Christopher Murphy
I'm with @ben_lindsay1: How did this not exist before?! Lowdown is superhelpful, especially when you're in a lot of Slacks and are time poor. Great work, Steven! 🎉 🚀 What it is is what it is!
Chris McClelland
I love how this summarises the best of our reading channel, and turns it into Sunday reading. Fascinated by all the potential of turning real-time messages + team/community votes and essentially automatically crowdsourcing newsletters. Keen to experiment with it as a way to do investor/customer updates. - Is it possible to make a newsletter from a private channel? P.s. really like your blog and transparency.
Steven Hylands
@chrismcclelland Thanks Chris. Yeah you can do this right now. When you join you get to select the channels (including private) you'd like your newsletter content to be generated from. 😊
Carol Rossborough
online micro communities are on the rise... this is a good way of keeping people engaged in targeted content !
Cormac Quinn
Brilliant idea, I have far too many slack communities to keep track of.
Mayra Urbano
This is incredible!
Dominic Lau
Really awesome product - I run into the problem of keeping all of the community members engaged, and have tried to drag content into Mailchimp and send manually to a list of emails exported from Slack (but need to add new emails every time that I get new members since it doesn't update itself). Will try it out this week :) Would love if the platform populated previews of content as well.
Steven Hylands
@dominicl Hey Dominic - thanks 😊When you say "populated previews of content" which content are you referring too. Keen to understand your use case. Thanks again
Dominic Lau
@shylands for example, when i want to include an article shared in slack, i'd love to have it show a preview (kind of like when slack previews the article with the image + subtext) or when i want to include a pdf attachment, maybe showing the title page as well.
Steven Hylands
@dominicl Ah got ya. We're on it ;) Specifically for links and images attached to posts at least initially. Generally we plan to make the newsletter much more visual and interesting 😊
Matthew Howells-Barby
Oh wow - this is actually exactly what we were looking for to avoid the manual task we have each week for Traffic Think Tank 2.0
Abner Dumoff
Someone needs to do this with Facebook timelines. Maybe Twitter too.
Lazhar benali
good like
Ciara Bryans
Too busy to keep me eye on Slack, so this is exactly what I need! 👏
Steven Hylands
@himynameisciara Great to hear :)
Kyle Gawley
Looking forward to giving this a go once I have a bit more traction in my community. Is it easy to possible to add links/articles to the newsletter by posting them in Slack?
Steven Hylands
@kylegawley Yeah any post in Slack can be added to your newsletter directly from Slack including links. We're working on an update that will represent any links in a nicer more visual way too.
Ian Browne
Brilliant idea, so much good stuff can be lost in slack. Installing immediately!
Ben Lindsay
This makes so much sense, can't understand why no one has done it before!
Scott Wylie
A great idea and product! I absolutely love it! Keeps our team engaged to what is going within the company. Nice job @shylands and @overture8 🙌🥳
Steven Hylands
@overture8 @scott_wylie1 Thank you Scott!
Phil McClure
@shylands @scott_wylie1 Thanks Scott :)
CONOR GRAHAM
love how it automatically highlights the posts with the most replies and emoji reactions!
Steven Hylands
@conorg763 Thanks Conor! Yeah it works really well especially in those very busy Slacks.